Abstract
BackgroundNecrotic enteritis (NE) caused by netB-positive type A Clostridium perfringens is an important bacterial disease of poultry. Through its complex regulatory system, C. perfringens orchestrates the expression of a collection of toxins and extracellular enzymes that are crucial for the development of the disease; environmental conditions play an important role in their regulation. In this study, and for the first time, global transcriptomic analysis was performed on ligated intestinal loops in chickens colonized with a netB-positive C. perfringens strain, as well as the same strain propagated in vitro under various nutritional and environmental conditions.ResultsAnalysis of the respective pathogen transcriptomes revealed up to 673 genes that were significantly expressed in vivo. Gene expression profiles in vivo were most similar to those of C. perfringens grown in nutritionally-deprived conditions.ConclusionsTaken together, our results suggest a bacterial transcriptome responses to the early stages of adaptation, and colonization of, the chicken intestine. Our work also reveals how netB-positive C. perfringens reacts to different environmental conditions including those in the chicken intestine.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12866-016-0792-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Necrotic enteritis (NE) caused by netB-positive type A Clostridium perfringens is an important bacterial disease of poultry
Clostridium perfringens is an important pathogen of humans and animals. netB-positive type A strains of C. perfringens cause necrotic enteritis (NE) in broiler chickens, a common bacterial infection that has conventionally been controlled by antibiotics
Chicken intestinal loops were used to represent in vivo infection in a single time point (4 h) infected under controlled conditions and the in vitro growth conditions involved addition to different media to represent aspects of the different environments that might be encountered by C. perfringens during the pathogenesis of necrotic enteritis
Summary
Necrotic enteritis (NE) caused by netB-positive type A Clostridium perfringens is an important bacterial disease of poultry. NetB-positive type A strains of C. perfringens cause necrotic enteritis (NE) in broiler chickens, a common bacterial infection that has conventionally been controlled by antibiotics. The removal of “growth-promoting” antibiotics in broiler chickens in Europe and increasing demands elsewhere for antibiotic-free chicken are focusing efforts to find alternative approaches to control [1, 2]. High-throughput DNA sequencing methods have provided a comprehensive method for mapping and quantifying the complete set of transcripts (“transcriptome”) of an organism. This RNA sequencing method (“RNASeq”) has clear advantages over previous approaches to gene expression analysis [7]
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